Vi • PREFACE. 



the sake of their intrinsic interest from a purely historical 

 point of view. 



Finding that the labour required for the investigation, 

 even as thus limited, is much greater than I originally 

 anticipated, it appears to me undesirable to delay publication 

 until the whole shall have been completed. I have therefore 

 decided to publish the treatise in successive instalments, of 

 which the present constitutes the first. As indicated by the 

 title, it is concerned exclusively with the Origin of Human 

 Faculty. Future instalments will deal with the Intellect, 

 Emotions, Volition, Morals, and Religion. It will, however, be 

 several years before I shall be in a position to publish these 

 succeeding instalments, notwithstanding that some of them 

 are already far advanced. 



Touching the present instalment, it is only needful to 

 remark that from a controversial point of view it is, perhaps, 

 the most important. If once the genesis of conceptual thought 

 from non-conceptual antecedents be rendered apparent, the 

 great majority of competent readers at the present time 

 would be prepared to allow that the psychological barrier 

 between the brute and the man is shown to have been over- 

 come. Consequently, I have allotted what might otherwise 

 appear to be a disproportionate amount of space to my 

 consideration of this the origin of human faculty — dis- 

 proportionate, I mean, as compared with what has afterwards 

 to be said touching the development of human faculty in its 

 several branches already named. Moreover, in the present 

 treatise I shall be concerned chiefly with the psychology of 

 my subject — reserving for my next instalment a full con- 

 sideration of the light which has been shed on the mental and 

 social condition of early man by the study of his own remains 

 on the one hand, and of existing savages on the other. Even 

 as thus restricted, however, the subject-matter of the present 

 treatise will be found more extensive than most persons 

 would have been prepared to expect. For it does not appear 

 to me that this subject-matter has hitherto received at the 

 hands of psychologists any approach to the amount of 



